Police Arrest Protesters Occupying Building at U.C. Berkeley (2024)

Here’s the latest on campus protests.

In all, more than 2,900 people have been arrested or detained on campuses across the country in recent weeks in connection with the protests.

Here are some of the latest developments:

• A Republican-led congressional committee released a scathing report on Thursday that accused Harvard administrators of neglecting the recommendations of the university’s own antisemitism advisory group. The report was produced by a committee whose pointed questions at a hearing last year led to criticism and the eventual resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay.

• Police officers cleared a protest encampment at DePaul University in Chicago on Thursday morning and arrested two people. Some demonstrators remained at a nearby intersection, blocking traffic, after the tents were removed.

• Members of the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan were jarred awake early Wednesday when pro-Palestinian protesters chanted outside their homes, posted demands on their doors and, in at least one case, left behind tents and fake corpses wrapped in red-stained sheets. In a statement, the university called the actions intimidating and dangerous.

• At Columbia University in New York, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a resolution of no confidence in the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, on Thursday, saying she had engaged in an “unprecedented assault on students’ rights.” Though largely symbolic, the resolution underscored the anger that Dr. Shafik faces over her handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

• At the University of California, Los Angeles, the Academic Senate voted on Thursday on whether to formally rebuke the university’s chancellor, Gene Block, over a violent episode on the campus about two weeks ago. The results may not be available for days.

Reporting was contributed by Bob Chiarito, Jill Cowan, Coral Murphy Marcos, Sharon Otterman and Stephanie Saul.

At least 12 people are arrested at U.C. Berkeley after the police order protesters to disperse.

Around 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, dozens of officers from the California Highway Patrol and local police and sheriff’s departments began surrounding the area, using bullhorns to order protesters to disperse within 30 minutes or face arrest.

By 7:30 p.m., at least a dozen people had been taken into custody, said Dan Mogulof, a university spokesman. He said it was unclear how many of the protesters were U.C. Berkeley students.

Two days before the arrests, pro-Palestinian demonstrators dismantled a much-larger encampment on campus at Sproul Plaza after reaching an agreement with the school chancellor, Carol Christ.

She said that the university would begin discussions around divestment from certain companies and that she planned to publicly support “efforts to secure an immediate and permanent cease-fire” by the end of the month. But she said that divestment from companies that do business with, or in, Israel was not within her authority.

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Harvard ignored antisemitism advisory group’s recommendations, House committee says.

“Harvard’s leadership propped up the university’s Antisemitism Advisory Group all for show,” Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican, and the chairwoman of the House committee, said in a statement issued with the report. “Not only did the A.A.G. find that antisemitism was a major issue on campus, it offered several recommendations on how to combat the problem — none of which were ever implemented with any real vigor.”

In response, Harvard said that the advisory group had helped to establish the groundwork for its continuing efforts to combat antisemitism on campus. The group has since disbanded and been replaced by two task forces, one to combat antisemitism and another to combat anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias.

Jason Newton, a Harvard spokesman, said the university was cooperating with the committee, and had provided 30,000 pages of information.

“It is disappointing to see selective excerpts from internal documents, shared in good faith, released in this manner, offering an incomplete and inaccurate view of Harvard’s overall efforts to combat antisemitism last fall and in the months since,” Mr. Newton said.

Thursday’s report was the first to come out of the House committee’s recent grilling of university presidents in congressional hearings on campus antisemitism, and the committee said there would be more to come. Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president at the time, was among the first to testify in December, and her legalistic answers helped lead to her resignation a month later.

According to the report, the group’s recommendations included holding student organizations accountable to university rules, countering antisemitic speech, reviewing the academic rigor of classes and programs reported to have antisemitic content, and investigating the potential influence of “dark money” from Iran, Qatar and associates of known terrorist groups.

The committee also said several Harvard offices designed to combat discrimination, including the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, had failed to vigorously address antisemitism at the university.

A majority of the members of the antisemitism advisory group were so disillusioned by Harvard’s lack of response to their work that they threatened to resign, the House report said.

Much of the material in the report came from notes of advisory group meetings that Harvard produced in response to a Feb. 16 subpoena and from the transcript of a committee interview with Dara Horn, an advisory group member.

Some examples of incidents of antisemitism the committee cited included a Harvard student’s report of being spat on while wearing a skullcap, an email chain describing threats to Harvard Hillel from students and others affiliated with the university, and an Israeli student being asked to leave a class because “some people feel uncomfortable that you’re here.”

But many of the anecdotal examples in the report were vague, with no mention of names, dates or corresponding police reports or other documentation.

In a letter to Harvard’s president and provost, five of the eight advisory members, including Dr. Horn, said that the lack of clarity of their mission had become a serious problem, according to the report. “The five of us listed below have conferred as a group and agreed that we will not be in a position to continue in our advocacy roles unless Harvard broadly reconsiders the ways in which it is confronting the antisemitism crisis on campus,” the Nov. 5 letter said. One of the advisory board members, Rabbi David Wolpe, did resign on Dec. 7.

The House education committee has had tremendous influence over the public image of the universities it has invited to testify. But it is unclear how much legislative power it has to change the way universities do business.

After Dr. Gay’s testimony, Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, testified in April, and showed a tougher stance against pro-Palestinian protesters.

Her remarks led to a crackdown of an encampment at her school, which inspired a wave of student demonstrations at universities across the country, including at Harvard. Harvard’s encampment lasted three weeks before protesters reached an agreement with the university to quickly process petitions for the reinstatement of participants who had been barred from campus and to discuss the terms of its endowment, a nod to calls for divestment from Israel.

And on May 23, the presidents of Northwestern, Rutgers and the University of California, Los Angeles, are expected to testify before the committee.

Protesters at U.C. Irvine clash with police as an encampment is cleared.

The chancellor of the university, Howard Gillman, wrote in a letter to the campus community Wednesday evening that he had been “prepared to allow a peaceful encampment to exist on the campus without resorting to police intervention,” but that by occupying a building, protesters had transformed “a manageable situation that did not have to involve police into a situation that required a different response.”

Protesters at U.C. Irvine have called for the university to divest itself from investments in companies that profit from the war in Gaza, to disclose the university’s assets and investments, and to end joint academic programs with Israel, among other demands.

By 9 p.m. Wednesday evening, the encampment at U.C. Irvine had mostly been cleared. The university moved all classes on Thursday to remote instruction, but planned to return to in-person instruction on Friday.

— Jonathan Wolfe Jonathan Wolfe reported from the campus of the University of California, Irvine.

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A Columbia faculty group passes a no-confidence resolution against its president.

The resolution particularly criticized Dr. Shafik’s decision to call the police into campus to clear a pro-Palestinian student encampment on April 18, even after the executive committee of the University Senate had unanimously told her not to do it. The resolution said that she had “falsely claimed” that the students were a “clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the university,” arguing instead that they were peaceful.

She also violated the norms of academic freedom when she promised to fire faculty members in testimony before a congressional committee on antisemitism on April 17, the resolution said.

“The president’s choices to ignore our statutes and our norms of academic freedom and shared governance, to have our students arrested and to impose a lockdown of our campus with continuing police presence, have gravely undermined our confidence in her,” the resolution stated.

Dr. Shafik has not made any public appearances before students since calling in the police to rout protesters from Hamilton Hall, a campus building, on April 30, outside of a video the school posted online this month in which she addressed the broader university community. Citing security concerns, she has kept the main campus in a state of partial lockdown for more than two weeks, and canceled the main graduation ceremony over which she would have presided.

“President Shafik continues to consult regularly with members of the community, including faculty, administration and trustees, as well as with state, city and community leaders,” Ben Chang, a Columbia spokesman, said in a comment. “She appreciates the efforts of those working alongside her on the long road ahead to heal our community.”

The many smaller graduation ceremonies for each of Columbia’s 19 colleges have gone relatively smoothly, but they were not without signs of protests. Some students wore black-and-white kaffiyehs; others unfurled small Palestinian flags. The valedictorian of Columbia College, the university’s main undergraduate school, held up a sign that said “Divest” as she walked around the stage.

Outside of the ceremonies, a few people handed out fliers to friends and family members waiting in line with the protesters’ demands, including that the school divest from companies that work with Israel. A billboard truck also occasionally circled displaying a photo of Dr. Shafik on a bright red background with the text “TIME TO RESIGN!”

Saham David Ahmed Ali, the student speaker at the university’s Mailman School of Public Health, used her graduation speech to call for a cease-fire in Gaza and lay out the demands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, receiving broad cheers. Her microphone cut out briefly during her speech: A college spokesperson called it an unintentional technical glitch.

Those relatively modest protests were in contrast to those at other schools around the city, including the New School and parts of the City University of New York, a public system, where larger demonstrations have taken place in recent days. Students at CUNY and at New York University also briefly occupied buildings, but stood down without the police intervening.

A different group of students and faculty members at Columbia circulated an open letter calling on Dr. Shafik to better enforce security on campus, and saying they supported her efforts to crack down on protesters. That letter, which by Thursday was signed by hundreds of people, including alumni, parents and others with no ties to the university, mentioned multiple incidents it cited as antisemitic.

The group that brought the no-confidence resolution against Dr. Shafik does not “represent many faculty and students at Columbia University,” the letter stated.

As she attempts to weather the tensions, Dr. Shafik has been holding private meetings with faculty and other Columbia community members to repair ties and find a way forward without resigning. (Three other Ivy League presidents have resigned in the last six months, although it is not clear that all of their departures were related to tensions over the war in Gaza and the related protests.)

On Wednesday, Dr. Shafik wrote a conciliatory note to students and published it in the school newspaper in lieu of a graduation speech.

“You may not agree with every decision taken by university leadership, but please know that it came from a place of care and concern for the common good at Columbia,” she wrote. She added that she would “look back on the class of 2024 with admiration and special fondness.”

The resolution, held among the largest group of faculty members at the college, passed with 458 votes in favor, 206 votes against and 45 abstentions. Of the 899 faculty members eligible to vote, 709 completed a ballot. It appeared to be the first time that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia had ever passed a vote of no confidence in a president, several faculty members said.

On April 26, the University Senate, which consists of 111 delegates from across Columbia, passed a resolution calling for an investigation into Dr. Shafik’s actions, but stopping short of a censure. That resolution accused the administration of violating established protocols, undermining academic freedom, jeopardizing free inquiry and breaching the due process rights of both students and professors.

Though it was critical, Thursday’s no-confidence resolution was not a call for Dr. Shafik to resign, said Robert Newton, an oceanographer at Columbia and a member of the executive committee of the American Association of University Professors. Instead, it charted a path forward.

“A vote of no confidence in the president is the first step toward rebuilding our community and re-establishing the university’s core values of free speech, the right to peaceful assembly and shared governance,” the resolution stated.

There are about 4,700 full-time faculty members at Columbia, of which the Faculty of Arts and Science represents about 20 percent. Many of the student protesters who were disciplined and arrested study with arts and science faculty members, “so it makes sense that they would come down the most firmly about this issue,” Dr. Newton said.

Liset Cruz contributed reporting.

Columbia professors host an alternative graduation for students.

Many students had expressed dismay when Columbia’s leadership canceled the university’s main commencement ceremony, and moved most events off campus. In the weeks leading up to graduation, the school’s administration had called the police twice to remove protesters from its Morningside Heights campus, where students established a pro-Palestinian encampment and occupied a building.

In a letter to the New York Police Department in April, Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, requested that the police remain on campus until at least May 17 “to maintain order and ensure encampments are not reestablished.”

Administrators said they were “deeply disappointed” at having to change plans for graduation, but said the security issues were “insurmountable.”

During the alternative event on Thursday, held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, college students from across New York City attended, and many wore the powder blue caps and gowns of Columbia. Some speakers grew emotional as the Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah read his poem “Dedication,” which he wrote during the first three months of the war in Gaza.

Toward the end of the ceremony, organizers played a video message from Hind Khoudary, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, who thanked the protesters for their actions.

“We never imagined that anyone is gonna ever give us hope the way you guys did,” she said. “Hopefully I’ll see you one day soon when all of this ends.”

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University of California workers authorize their union to call a strike over crackdowns.

The vote does not guarantee a strike but rather gives the executive board of the local union, which is part of the United Auto Workers, the ability to call a strike at any time. Eight of the 10 University of California campuses still have a month of instruction left before breaking for summer.

The union said it had called the vote because the University of California unilaterally and unlawfully changed policies regarding free speech, discriminated against pro-Palestinian speech and created an unsafe work environment by allowing attacks on protesters, among other grievances.

“At the heart of this is our right to free speech and peaceful protest,” Rafael Jaime, the president of U.A.W. 4811, said in a statement after the vote. “If members of the academic community are maced and beaten down for peacefully demonstrating on this issue, our ability to speak up on all issues is threatened.”

A spokeswoman for the University of California president’s office said in a statement that a strike would set “a dangerous precedent that would introduce nonlabor issues into labor agreements.”

“To be clear, the U.C. understands and embraces its role as a forum for free speech, lawful protests and public debate,” said the spokeswoman, Heather Hansen. “However, given that role, these nonlabor-related disputes cannot prevent it from fulfilling its academic mission.”

There are still several active encampments at University of California campuses, including U.C. Merced, U.C. Santa Cruz and U.C. Davis. On Tuesday, protesters at U.C. Berkeley began dismantling their encampment after reaching an agreement with university officials.

In a letter to the protesters on Tuesday, Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol Christ, said that the university would begin discussions around divestment from certain companies and that she planned to publicly support “efforts to secure an immediate and permanent cease-fire” by the end of the month. But she said that divestment from companies that do business with, or in, Israel was not within her authority.

After packing up their tents, some of the Berkeley protesters traveled on Wednesday to U.C. Merced to attend a meeting held by the University of California governing board. More than 100 people signed up to give public comment, and nearly all of those who spoke about the protests criticized the handling of them by university administrations.

The strike authorization vote enables what is known as a “stand-up” strike, a tactic that was first employed by the United Auto Workers last year during its contract negotiations with General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis. Rather than calling on all members to strike at once, the move allows the local union’s executive board to focus strikes on certain campuses or among certain groups of workers, to gain leverage.

Mr. Jaime, the U.A.W. 4811 president, said before the vote that the union would use the tactic to “reward campuses that make progress” and possibly call strikes at those that don’t. He added that the union would announce the strikes “only at the last minute, in order to maximize chaos and confusion for the employer.”

The union said on Wednesday that its executive board would announce later this week if it was calling for strikes.

Tobias Higbie, a professor of history and labor studies at U.C.L.A., said that while striking for free speech was unusual, it wasn’t unheard-of. The academic workers’ union is also largely made up of young people, who have been far more receptive to organized labor than young people in even the recent past, he said.

“It points to how generational change is not only impacting workplaces, but it’s going to impact unions,” Mr. Higbie said. “Young members are going to make more and more demands like this on their unions as we go forward over the next couple of years, and so I think it’s probably a harbinger of things to come.”

Jill Cowan contributed reporting.